Book: The Problem of Evil - A Biblical Perspective by Doug Erlandson

Doug Erlandson

about this book: This book addresses the age-old question: "If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, then why is there evil in the world?

If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then He certainly has the ability to eliminate evil. If He is all-good, then He has the desire to eliminate evil. Since evil exists, it would seem that God is either not all-powerful or all-knowing on the one hand or all-good on the other."

My book looks at various proposed solutions to the problem of evil, shows their inadequacies, and proposes a solution based on how the Bible addresses this issue. It is clearly written in a jargon-free fashion so that the layperson without any philosophical or theological background can read and understand it. Therefore, anyone who is perplexed as to why God would permit evil (and many people have this perplexity) will be able to understand what I have written and benefit from it. At the same time, there is enough serious argumentation that those who have studied the issue will also find it beneficial.

As a professor of philosophy specializing in the philosophy of religion wrote two widely circulated articles on this topic, including "A New Perspective on the Problem of Evil."

After I became a Christian, I still wasn't satisfied with the solutions others had proposed to this problem. Eventually, I concluded that the only way to resolve the problem of evil was to do it the way the Bible does, which is to assume that God is sovereign over all things and that we must trust Him to have created the world that it the one most suitable for His purposes. Moreover, we must trust His promises that He is working out all things for His glory and for the ultimate good of His creation. In a nutshell, we must adopt a theocentric rather than an anthropocentric view of evil.